Friday, November 18, 2016

147. “…then we have problems” & } “the night.”

To my students: Music matters. To write matters.
Art matters—and not just art that’s overtly political or confrontational: art
requires us—artists and audience—to see. To see what actually is. What good
practice that is.

Barak Obama in Berlin: “If we are not serious
about facts and what’s true and what’s not, and particularly in an age of
social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites
and off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and
propaganda, then we have problems.”

Jay-Z, from Deconstructed: “The problem isn’t in
the rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don’t
even know how to listen to the music.” and “…the Fox News dummies. They
wouldn’t know art if it fell on them.”

On election day, early in the morning, I read from
the new SHARKPACK Annual, “the night.” Editor Joseph Spece writes, “We believe strongly in
the duties of high art; the ‘intimate revolt’; the simultaneously inscrutable
and substantive spirit of the avant-garde; and the Sublime that exceeds us.”

Except for OUTLAND 1 – 6, the poems can both be
read and listened to; do both. Check out Nels Hanson’s retelling of Washington
Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” written in triplets with muted rhymes throughout—the
second stanza: “children, said I was a shiftless / simpleton, idiot
who couldn’t / tell sun from rain. She swung”—“children” and
“simpleton”—and the alliteration of “shiftless / simpleton idiot… couldn’t.” I was struck by the last couplet of Katie Howes’ “Have you been found?”: “She then climbed to the top / of
the yellow shed and waited.” Brought to mind The Epic of Gilgamesh, when
Sidhuri escapes to the roof of her tavern as the ragged Gilgamesh breaks down
her gate, and saw correspondence with C. D. Wright's “What Do You Think’s In the Shed?” Struck, too, by Peter Longford’s line, “Lullabies, tender. Hoodwinks, loverly.” from
“Majuscule.” He reads well, too. By Sue Robert’s “Meat”: “forgive me,
I would say to them, / long dead, sourced and distal, even their beautiful long
/ bones useful.”

“In addition to letters,” editor Spece writes, “this
issue features a mixtape of experimental music from Onga and the Italian
alt-label Boring Machines”—he suggests we set aside an hour and “a spliff” and
listen. I hit exhaustion instead. I like the mix—Everest Magma and, Mai Mai
Mai: check out Mai Mai Mai's version of the soundtrack from Fulci's Sette Note In Nero
(“The Psychic”)—AWESOME.

Penultimate, a pair of drawings by Colleen
Maynard—graphite and charcoal; presumably close-ups, as in her FossilCollection series. The way
getting close can make an object hard to see. No, hard to know. The universe,
as seen from Earth.